Dream telepathy - experimental and clinical findings

Over the course of my life I
have had close encounters of four kinds with the paranormal or what has come to
be known as psi phenomena.1 In 1932, at the age of sixteen, I
happened on the subject of what was then called "psychic phenomena".
Impressed with how many great names were associated with the study of
mediumship (William James, J. W. Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge), several college
friends and I embarked upon seances of our own at weekly intervals and lasting
almost two years. The striking physical effects we encountered left their mark
on each of us over the many years we remained in touch.2

That was encounter number one.
It left me with a lifelong interest in the "paranormal" and an
openness to it. Encounter number two was more fleeting and personal and lacked
the consensual quality of my youthful experiences. It took the form of very
occasional dreams that seemed to me to be either telepathic or precognitive.
Here is one such dream that Jung might have considered a good example of
synchronicity:3

The setting
was late in 1945. 1 had just returned from military duty overseas and was
enrolled as a candidate in a psychoanalytic program. The dream occurred early
in my own analysis. In it I was watching an opera and was surprised to see a
classmate of mine, who I shall refer to as Nat, appearing as one of the dancers
on stage. Nat was a big, heavyset man weighing well over two hundred pounds. I
knew him only casually as a fellow student. He was older than most of us,
probably around fifty. I reported the dream in my next analytic session. The
phone rang just as I completed my account. As he usually did, my analyst picked
up the phone but the conversation went on for an unusual length of time,
accompanied by sounds of laughter reaching my ears. With obvious surprise he
then related the content of the call: "That was Nat and he was excited
about the fact that he had been accepted for a part in a ballet and had his
first performance last night when he danced on the stage of the Metropolitan
Opera House."

I had known Nat was in analysis
with my analyst, but by no stretch of my imagination could I have conceived of
him as a ballet dancer. As an acausal coincidence it was loaded with meaning
for me. Prior to its occurrence and very early in my analysis I had revealed my
interest in parapsychology. I did not know for sure but sensed this would not
be greeted favourably by my analyst who I knew to be a Marxist. To touch
lightly on the dynamics of what was going on at the time I had a need
(neurotically so) for both his approval and to be seen as special. I had the
uncomfortable feeling that the exposure of my interest in the paranormal would
result in my being seen as special, but not in the way I wanted it to. What
better way of demonstrating the soundness of this interest than by
participating in a precognitive dream scenario where both of us were vying for
the analyst's attention at the same time.

Encounter number three was
clinical in nature and occurred sporadically in the course of my psychoanalytic
practice which ranged from 1946 to 1961. The dreams of my patients were of
interest to me, not only for their ability to expose the deepest emotional
currents at play, but also because of the historical associations of altered
states of consciousness, such as dreams, with the occurrence of psi effects.
One of the earliest investigators was F. W. H. Myers whose classic study (1903)
explored the connection of psychic events to what he referred to as the
subliminal level of awareness.

It was Freud (1963) who
embellished this simple model with his speculations concerning the dynamic
import of telepathic commu­nications in their relevance to current conflicts,
and the way in which unconscious processing left its imprint on the telepathic
message. Surprisingly enough, or perhaps not, these early specula­tions of
Freud were picked up by only a few of his followers, notably Stekel (1921) 4
until the forties when a number of psychiatric contributions appeared. These
focused on the psycho­logical factors conducive to the occurrence of psi
effects. Most came through in the dreams of patients and did so under
conditions which highlighted problematic aspects of the transference.

Certain criteria emerged which
proved useful in identifying a dream as presumptively telepathic:

1. The corresponding elements between dream and reality should be:

a) Unusual, i.e. not ordinarily occurring in dreams, or in the dreams of
the particular patient.

b) Non-inferential, i.e. elements the patient could not ordinarily infer
from his knowledge of the therapist or his experience with him.

c) Intrusive. This is included not as an absolute criterion, but when it
does occur it is generally a reliable indicator of a paranormal event. It
refers to the quality of standing apart and appearing as strange, unfamiliar or
intrusive to the dreamer.

2. The relationship between the events in the therapist's life and the
telepathic mirroring of them in the patient's dream should occur in close
temporal relationship, usually a matter of several days.

3. The criterion of psychological meaning. The correspondence provides a
unique strategy of defence employed by patients under conditions where the
knowledge gained in this way reflects problematic aspects arising in the course
of therapy.

The circumstances under which
telepathic events appear in dreams have been variously described. Almost all
writers empha­sized the role of transferential and counter-transferential
factors. As a result of either irrational needs on the part of the patient or
the sensing of some negative quality in the therapist, the patient may, through
the telepathic manoeuvre, succeed in exposing a particu­larly vulnerable area
in the therapist. Servadio (1956) emphasized the patient's frustration and the
blockage of communication. He saw sleep as favouring telepathic transmission by
virtue of its regressive release of archaic mechanisms. Eisenbud (1970) was
among the first to demonstrate the therapeutic usefulness of actively working
with the telepathy hypothesis. Ehrenwald (1955) wrote extensively both on the
criteria as well as the possible role of paranormal factors in the major
psychoses. Ullman (1980) noted some of the characterologic and communication
difficulties of the consistent telepathic dreamers.

Telepathic dreams occurred
sporadically in my practice under varied circumstances. They came about when my
own agenda interfered with effective contact (my counter-transference) or when
the patient resorted to the telepathic manoeuvre in the interest of her own
transferential needs. Both may be involved, as was the case with one patient
who consistently responded to my personal and somewhat distracting need to have
case material whenever I was about to write or lecture on the subject of
telepathic dreams, while at the same time she established her own special
status as a telepathic dreamer. Used manipulatively in this way, her secret
knowledge was made known to the therapist while being in a position to disclaim
any responsibility.

The inhibited, obsessively
organized individual who tends to use language in the service of distancing
mechanisms rather than facilitating contact is more likely to fall back on this
manoeuvre. Telepathy appears as one way of maintaining contact at critical
points in the management of contradictory needs for distance and inviolability
and at the same time serving the inextinguishable need for closeness and
safety.

In the following example, a
dream containing unusual dream elements corresponded to a real event in my
life. In this instance, the dream and the real-life event occurred on the same
night (Ullman, 1980). A forty-two-year-old female patient, a seamstress,
reported the following dream:

I was at home
with my boyfriend John. There was a bottle on the table containing part alcohol
and part cream. It was sort of a white foamy stuff. John wanted to drink it. I
said, "No, you can drink it later." I looked at the label. It read
"Appealing Nausea." I meant to drink it when we went to bed, although
we seemed to be in bed at the time.

She then reported another dream
fragment from that same night:

I had a small
leopard. It was very dangerous. I wrapped him up and put him in a large bowl.
Mother told me to take him out or he would die.

On the evening of the night the
patient had these dreams, my wife and I attended a lecture at the New York
Academy of Medicine on the subject of animal neuroses. The speaker presented a
movie showing how cats can be made to develop an addiction to alcohol. Once the
addiction developed and the alcoholic cat was offered the choice of a dish of
milk or a dish of half-milk, half-alcohol the cat showed a preference for the alcohol-milk
mixture.

"Tracer" elements such
as the half-alcohol, half-cream mixture and the small feline creature suggest
the possibility of telepathy. To establish the likelihood of this, one has to
invoke the criterion of psychological meaning based on an elaboration of the
underlying dynamics. The analysis of the dream did support the telepathy
hypothesis. The scene in the movie, witnessed by the therapist, provided visual
metaphors that appropriately expressed dynamics that were surfacing at the time
in therapy. These included her feelings about the omnipotence of the therapist
in relation to her, suggested by her identification with the animal being
manipulated by the experimenter; her own despair about change, suggested by her
identification with a leopard, an animal that cannot change its spots; and her
ambivalence about relinquishing control and revealing the more sensual side of
her character, suggested by her intent to drink an alcohol mixture aptly
labelled "Appealing Nausea" at bedtime, while also being wary about
it.

My first three encounters, while
personally very meaningful, were essentially anecdotal in nature. Not
undertaken in a spirit of scientific inquiry, there was no rigorous effort to
rule out other possible causes, or chance itself. Such experiences carry
conviction for the one involved, but have generally been of no great interest
to science. Many well documented instances of this nature have been collecting
dust for years in the files of the British and the American Societies for Psychical
Research.

In consideration of this
reality, the next logical step was for me to consider the possibility of an
experimental approach. In 1960, in the course of my last year in practice, I
received a grant from the Parapsychology Foundation to conduct a pilot study to
apply the then recent discovery of the connection of rapid eye movements (REM)
to dreaming and how the possibility of near total recall of the dreams of the
night lent itself to a dream telepathy experiment. The results were of enough interest
to influence my decision in 1961 to terminate private practice and accept a
full-time hospital appoint­ment, making it possible for me to set up a sleep
laboratory in the hope of establishing a quantitative result under conditions
where all other possible causes were excluded.

Methodology

The formal studies were
initiated at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York in 1964 under
the direction of Dr Stanley Krippner. The subjects were young adults selected
on the basis of their ability to recall dreams and their interest in the
experiments The subject's sleep was monitored electroencephalographically and
he was awakened at the estimated end of each REM period to report his dream. An
agent or sender spent the night in a separate room attempting to telepathically
influence the subject's dreams by concentrating on the selected target picture
at intervals throughout the night, and particularly when signalled that a REM
period for the subject had begun. The target, generally an art print, was randomly
selected by the agent from a pool of targets in opaque, sealed containers after
the subject was in bed. Only the agent was aware of the target chosen for the
particular night and he remained in his room throughout the night acoustically
isolated from both subject and experimenter. The dream protocols were
transcribed from the taped reports. Copies of them, along with copies of the
targets used for any given experimental series, were given to three independent
judges who assessed correspondences on a blind basis.

The specific hypothesis under
consideration stated that a S's (subject's) dream protocol for any given
experimental night would reflect the influence of telepathy by. the appearance
in the S's dream of correspondences to the target material viewed by the agent.
Twelve 5 x 8 prints of famous paintings were selected as experimental targets.
On a given night one of these was randomly selected and opened by an agent in a
room at a distance from the subject. The latter remained in the sleep room throughout
the night. His or her sleep and REM pattern were monitored by an eight-channel
Medcraft Model D EEG in the adjacent control room. All verbal communication
between the S and E (experimenter) was mediated through an intercom system and
recorded on tape. Twelve different subjects were used in the first study, each
sleeping one night in the laboratory. In the morning associative data from the
S was added to the record of the dream reports. At a later point the
transcripts made from the tapes were sent to three independent outside judges
who had not been connected with the experimental procedure in any way. The
judges also received the twelve potential target pictures and were asked to
rank the targets in order of their closeness to each individual dream protocol,
first for the dream material alone and then for the dream plus the associative
data. The judges were also asked to express a confidence rating for each rank.
The subject judged his own dreams against the targets in a similar way.

The means of the judges' ranks
and ratings were entered on twelve-by-twelve tables and subjected to a two-way
analysis of variance (for targets and nights) according to the Scheffe method.
The rankings made by the Ss were handled similarly. The rankings were also evaluated
by binomial expansion, with hits including ranks of #1 through #6 and misses
including ranks from #7 to #12. The ranking of the subject was significant at
the 0.05 level when evaluated by the binomial expansion method.

The approach varied somewhat as
illustrated in the following studies.

I. The first screening study

For this study, twelve volunteer
Subjects (Ss) spend one night each at the laboratory. Two staff members, one
male and one female, alternated as Agents (As), attempting to influence Ss' dreams
by means of telepathy. Target materials were famous art prints, randomly
selected for each night once Ss had gone to bed. On the following morning, Ss
were asked to match their dream recall against the entire collection of target
pictures, selecting the art print which most closely corresponded to their
dreams and ranking the others in descending order of correspondence. Three
outside Judges (Js) followed a similar procedure; statistically significant
data emerged from Ss' rankings and from one of the J's evaluations.

II. The first Erwin study

Dr Erwin, whose target-dream
correspondences were the most direct in Series I, was paired with the male A
from the screening study for a seven-night series.

III. The second screening study

Twelve different Ss and two As
were utilized in another twelve-­night series.

IV. The Posin study

Dr R. Posin, who participated in
Series III, was paired with the A she had worked with during her night in the
laboratory.

V. The Grayeb study

T. Grayeb, another S from Series
III, was selected for this sixteen­-night study. Without the knowledge of S,
A concentrated on a target during eight nights of the study; for the other
eight nights there was neither an agent nor a target. The condition was
determined randomly once S had gone to bed.

VI. The second Erwin study

Dr W. Erwin was again paired
with the A from Series II for an eight-­night study. The art print was
accompanied by a box of "multi­sensory" materials on each night to
enhance the emotionality of the target. For example, Daumier's painting, Advice
to a Young Artist, was accompanied by a canvas and paints to enable A to
"act out" the artist's role. No S evaluation was accomplished for
this study.

VII. The Van de Castle study

Dr R. Van de Castle, an S who
had produced several direct target-­dream correspondences in a telepathy study
at another laboratory, was allowed to select his own A from the laboratory
staff during the eight-night series. He selected a total of three As: one for a
single night, one for two nights, and one for five nights. At the completion of
this study, I had the opportunity to explore in greater depth the dreams he had
with themes of aggression and sex, which had a greater telepathic impact. This
would be in line with the evidence from both anecdotal and clinical services
that paranormal events are linked to affective processes.

Results

After a
careful examination of our methodology and data Child (1985) summarized the
statistical results of the entire range of experiments performed on paranormal
dreaming (several on precognitive dreaming were included) at the Maimonides Medical
Center (see Table 1).*

Table 1

Summary of Maimonides Results on
Tendency for Dreams to Be Judged More Like Target Than Like Nontargets in
Target Pool

Series

Judges'

score

Subjects'

score

z or t resulting from judgments

Sources

Hit

Miss

Hit

Miss

Judges

Subjects

GESP:
Dreams monitored and recorded throughout night; agent
"transmitting" during each REM period

A. 1st screening

7

5

10

2

z
= 0.71b

z
= 1.33°

Unman. Krippner, & Feldstein
(1966)

B. 1st Erwin

5

2

8

I

z
= 2.53b

z
= 1.90b

Ullman et al. (1966)

C. 2nd screening

4

8

9

3

z=
-.25b

z
= 1.17b

Ullman (1969)

D. Posin

6

2

6

2

z
= 1.05c

z
= 1.05c

Ullman (1969)

E. Grayeb

3

5

5

3

z
= -.63c

z=
0.63c

Ullman. Krippner. & Vaughan (1973)

F. 2nd Erwin

8

0

t
= 4.93a

Ullman & Krippner (1969)

G. Van de Castle

6

2

8

0

t
= 2.81a

t
= 2.74a

Krippner & Ullman (1970)

H. Pilot sessions

53

14

42

22

z
= 4.20b

z
= 2.21b

Ullman et al. (1973)

Precognition:
Dreams monitored and recorded throughout night; target experience next day

1. 1st Bessent

7

1

t
= 2.81a

Krippner, Ullman. & Honorton
(1971)

J. 2nd Bessent

7

1

t
= 2.27a

Krippner, Honorton. & Ullman
(1972)

K. Pilot sessions

2

0

z
= 0.67c

Ullman et al. (1973)

GESP:
Dreams monitored and recorded throughout night; agent active only at
beginning or sporadically

L Sensory bombardment

6

0

4

4

z
= 3. 11b

z
= 0.00c

Krippner. Honorton. Ullman.
Masters & Houston (1971)

M. Grateful Dead

7

5

8

4

z
= 0.61c

z
= 0.81c

Krippner, Honorton. & Ullman
(1973)

Clairvoyance:
Dreams monitored and recorded throughout night: concealed target known to no
one

N. Pilot sessions

5

3

4

5

z
= 0.98b

z
= 0.00 b

Ullman et al. (1973)

GESP:
Single dreams

O. Vaughan. Harris, Parise

105

98

74

79

z
= 0.63c

z
= -.32c

Honorton, Krippner & Ullman
(1972)

Note: GESP = general extrasensory
perception. Italics identify results obtained with procedures that preserve
independence of judgments in a series. For some series, the published source
does not use the uniform measures entered in this table, and mimeographed
laboratory reports were also consulted. Superscripts indicate which measure
was available, in order of priority.

a ratings. b
Rankings. c Score (count of hits and misses)

*Reproduced
from Child (1985) with permission from the American Psychological Association.

Including in his assessment a
critique of the various efforts at replication, he concluded:

What is clear
is that the tendency toward hits rather than misses cannot reasonably be
ascribed to chance. There is some systematic­ - that is, nonrandom - source of
anomalous resemblance of dreams to targets. [Child, 1985, p. 122]

The
experiments at the Maimonides Medical Center on the possibility of ESP in
dreams clearly merit careful attention from psychologists who, for whatever
reason, are interested in the question of ESP. To firm believers in the
impossibility of ESP, they pose a challenge to skill in detecting experimental
flaws or to the understanding of other sources of error. To those who can
conceive that ESP might be possible, they convey suggestions about some of the
conditions influencing its appearance or absence and about techniques for
investigating it. [Child, 1985, p. 128]

Form

There is empirical evidence
suggesting that, in some instances at least, forms contained in the target
material come through more clearly and recognizably than the content itself.
This applies to complex targets as well as simple targets where the form itself
is the predominant feature.

There are two experimental
techniques which may have a possible bearing upon the perceptual aspect of
telepathic effects as this relates to similarities based on form. Each of these
techniques limits information input, but in different ways. Tachistoscopic
presentations limit exposure in time. Work with the stabilized retinal image
limits information ordinarily collected and maintained through the play of eye
movements about an object under fixation.

There have been a number of
experiments beginning with the awakened interest in the Pötzel phenomenon
demonstrating that cues occurring outside of conscious awareness can produce
perceptual illusions as well as influence cognitive problem-solving activity.
Ericksen (1958) suggests that what occurs following the subthreshold
presentation of a stimulus is not a registering of the stimulus at an
unconscious level, but simply a fragmentary partial perceptual response. It
takes the activated state of dreaming to bring to bear upon this unidentifiable
percept a number of response systems, which then clothe it with an identity
approximating the original stimulus. What is occurring is the very reverse of
the usual dynamic explanation in terms of unconscious perception, repres­sion,
and reappearance through the channels of censorship and dream work. The
appearance in the dream is based not on a lowered threshold for unconscious
perception, but rather on a lowered threshold during the REM state for the
activation of a number of relevant response systems which have the additive
effect of establishing at least some of the features of the original stimulus.

Klein (1959) agrees that for
discrimination to occur there must be some degree of partial registration in
awareness. He does insist that subception is a real effect, that fragments or
aspects of the image register in this way and that they can be recovered
directly through intentional recall and indirectly through associations and
dreams. An interesting effect noted in subception studies is the alteration in figure
ground relations with the loss of the ability to make that particular
distinction. Tachistoscopic display of the Rubin double profile results in two
opposing shapes confronting each other. Of importance from the standpoint of
telepathy, as we shall see, is that in the face of experimental cut-off of
information the object is fragmented, shapes are abstracted and autistic
processes shape the percept.

Similar effects are noted in
connection with the work of Evans (1967a,b) in his observations on fragmentation
phenomena asso­ciated with binocular stabilization. He notes that under
conditions of stabilization when a pattern disappears it does so in parts and
the parts drop out in a non-random fashion. He talks of levels in the hierarchy
of the visual system and suggests, as an explanation of the fragmentation
phenomena, that when the information supply is limited, as in stabilization
experiments, not all levels of the hierarchy are activated. As a consequence
only parts of the pattern are seen corresponding to the level of the hierarchy
reached. Evans also notes the characteristic stabilization fragments after
repeated tachistoscopic exposures (Figure 1).

The fragmentation of images
noted by Warcollier (1938) (Figures 2-4) and Sinclair (1930) (Figures
5-7), in their efforts to effect transfer of information at a distance,
resembles in remarkable ways the fragmentary percepts obtained through the two
experimental strategies described. Note the fragmentation of complex forms into
simpler forms (Figures 2 and 5) and the emergence of simple forms
out of more complex imagery (Figures 3, 4, 6 and 7). It is also
of interest to note the emergence of similar forms when similar targets are
used by two different investigators. Compare Figures 3 and 6, and
4 and 7. These findings suggest, by implication, that the
neurophysiological pathways involved in the processing of tele­pathic transfer
may be the same as in normal visual perception.

In our own experimental work
correspondences in form were noted under a variety of circumstances.

A. Explicit correlation between target and dream when simple forms were
used as targets (Ullman, 1966)6

Example 1

At 3:40 am a circle was drawn as
the target by experimenter (Figure 8). At 3:53 am the subject awakened and
reported the following dream:

I feel as if
I was sort of floating to sleep at the time. I had an image of a, oh, it wasn't
really like a dream, it was sort of like being on a round, like the bottom half
of a large tube, such as if you would be going into the Holland Tunnel or
something, sort of like a road. As I was travelling, there seemed to be people
there but it didn't seem to be like a typical dream, sort of falling asleep. I
caught an image and I was conscious of just having started to fall asleep. I
was on a road shaped like the curve of a trough.

Earlier as I
was falling asleep before I turned around, I had an image of a something that's
very positively shaped, like a door stop except it was upside down and there
were several smooth round shapes, as if I was going through these passages,
these round smooth shapes, the shape as I meant it only like a rounded
doorstop, sort of like the fin of a car but it was upside down and it wasn't
connected with the car. It was just like that.

Figure
8. Example 1-circle.

Example
2

This example used the same
subject and was on the same night as Example 1. At 4:30 am angular shapes were drawn by experimenter (Figure 9). At 6:30 am the subject reported the following dream:

I had a
number of dreams in sequence. But I don't remember them well. One was, we were
standing around, some people were standing around, and they had in their hands
canes shaped like hockey sticks, used upside down, the curved part up. But they
were shaped more like free form than plain hockey sticks. And there was
in the dream two of my wife's cousins-a married couple. We see them about twice
a year and in the dream I was kind of indifferent to them or critical of them
because of some opinions they had. And you made a comment, "Why are you so
critical?" And I had other dreams I can't recall, there were a series of
them. You sort of woke me up after I had them. I mean you asked me about the
dreams after they had gone on for some time in the past. As a matter of fact, I
remember waking up after the one with the hockey sticks and wondering why you
didn't ask me whether I had been dreaming. I went back to sleep. That's all I
can think of.

Inquiry the following morning
produced this additional information:

[You
mentioned hockey sticks?] Yes, I guess it was like a party, people were there
and they had canes, but very nicely shaped canes like hockey sticks,
they weren't hockey sticks actually but about the same size, long and the shape
was very good for them. Now I think I know ... before I went to sleep I was thinking
of the fact that Leah and I were invited to a banquet at the Waldorf given by
this international society for the welfare of cripples, maybe that's why this
came, and of course I don't like the idea of having to go formal and we were
planning to go camping around that time but it seemed we were invited as
guests. The hockey sticks were not all exactly the same shape. It has to do
with disability, at the same time in spite of the disabilities these people get
around pretty well.

B. Explicit correlation between dream and formal aspects of target when
more complex target material was used

Example
3

The target picture showed a monk
squatting before what the agent initially took to be a square blue patch of
stone. Later, on closer examination, this appeared to be a garden. Along one
border there was a diamond-shaped pattern in the pavement (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Example 3-monk.

4:20 am:

I was
approaching a masonry wall with the stones put together very neatly. Someone
else and I are seated in a cab of some large vehicle - it might be a tractor.
We're coming up to this wall. I was with someone else. We were travelling in
what seemed like the front of some very big vehicle parallel to the large wall.
We came to a small diamond-shaped hole in the wall. One of us remarked
"Look at that." The wall was gray.

5:24 am:

There was a
figure of a diamond, a diamond shape was in it.

5:35 am:

We were in Alaska,
my wife and I were together. It was about 7:00 o'clock in the morning and I
said to her, "Well, it's very unlikely that you'll ever see the sun this
low in the horizon again at such an hour." And she said, "Yes, I
noticed that." It wasn't at all cold. We were walking along in what seemed
to be a forest with only what seemed to be very few trees until we came to one
large, very large tree, with thick branches, no leaves. It was at the time when
it didn't seem to be cold, and Lillian pointed out to me that on the trunk of
the tree there was a large diamond, like a trapezoid, that had been cut out of
the centre of the trunk of the tree.

It should be noted that the
first dream described a masonry wall with stones put together neatly. The three
subsequent dreams all make reference to diamond shapes.

C. Implicit correspondences between dream and formal aspects of target when
more complex target material was used

... there was
the experience of mounds. The feeling was of being surrounded on a
field, a monstrous field, by sort of like anthills, but large numbers of
them, and climbing over them. and around them back and forth. and not being
able to find a way out. Then it changes to a feeling of wearing a conical
hat, much like a wizard ... Everything was spinning around counterclockwise,
whirling, whirling, turning, and it's going in the same direction, and in some
respects I was forcing consciously, deliberately, helping myself in the
process, as if I was doing a spin ...

Dream no. 2:

... I
remember describing to you sensations ... and these were being in some sort of
tunnel, some sort of windy, open plain, climbing up to a hill ... I
thought of... Mt. Appelier. I think this was the first thing I had
related, where I had felt I was going up a road, driving my car of some sort
and looking back and forth, but still going upward, you know, ascending this
mountain ... They weren't exactly anthills. Initially, they started off as
bumps, sort of like ... a fez, but they were small and rounded off on top
instead of squared off like a fez. It's like the little pies children
make with a pail.

[The
experimenter then asked "Please make a guess at what you think the target
for the night was."]

[Subject] One
of the elements that pervaded almost everything was this conical shape-pointed,
conical, mountainlike, conical, hat-like cones ... I'd say some sort of form
element, conical in shape ... It's the one thing that seems to unify all of the
fantasy, and all of the dreams.

Example 5

The target was "The Dark
Figure" - a painting by Castellon (Figure 12). This painting portrays four
people, lone of them garbed in a sombre, dark-brown gown. There are four round
hoops above the figures; the hoops are held in the air by distorted children's
hands. In the background is a red brick wall.

First dream report:

... For some
reason I've been thinking of a barrel ... you know, spinning around ... There
was some kind of activity or motion going on. The barrel was spinning
... like spinning in a circle ... It was like spinning. A top. Clockwise, left
to right ... Dark Brown wooden colour ... A red wheel spinning around.

Second dream report:

I thought I
saw lights and these lights were arranged in almost a circular fashion ... You
have a circle again and there was some movement there ...

... there was
a photograph I was looking at and in this photograph there was a bunch of
people standing, and out front there were four people in costumes whose picture
we were taking ... They were just posing ... and looked pretty ridiculous ...

Post-sleep interview:

... All I
remember at first, I think, was these wooden barrels, maybe three or four ...
There was the iron rim going around the middle to hold the slats together, and
... going around and around, spinning like a top ... I also remember something
about pale greenish-white lights ... They formed kind of like an arch as though
they started to spiral or circle... swirling like whirlpools ... This
photograph was a rather big one and it had these young guys in costumes ... Two
summers ago when I went to that camp for retarded children, they asked me to
put on skits and costumes ... There is a lot of circling and spiralling effects
in my dreams, so any combination of effects like those I would look for in the
target.

Example 6

The target was the painting
Football Players by Henri Rousseau (Figure 13).

Figure 13. Football Players, by
Henri Rousseau, 1908.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Collection.

First dream:

Semicircular.
In the first one, I'm sort of near a balcony, only I'm inside the building and
the balcony comes back into the building in a semicircular way. I suppose the
balcony itself outside the doorway is some kind of straight routine type of
balcony structure, but I'm inside the buildings (if you want to call it that),
but it's more like a courtyard, and there's like a railing coming inside from
the balcony along the floor of this stone courtyard, and 1 had the feeling as
though it had vines on it or something. As you approached the balcony to look
out, it seems to look over something like the mall in Washington - toward like
the Washington Monument.

And then the
second image I got was again standing in a kind of courtyard looking toward a
sort of Roman courtyard - it's more of­ - it's a European kind of building,
with a sort of terrace jutting out from the bottom of the building again, a
semicircular quality like statues in a semicircle; the two ends of the semicircle
are toward me and the semicircle goes back away from me, and there's
like a fountain in the centre. That's all. Those two things came to me. Sort of
half-dreaming, half-asleep way.

Second dream:

A floor in
Bloomingdales where the houseware stuff is, and there's like empty book shelves
on the left side of the room, on one of these - and these shelves are like
painted black, and the wall behind the shelf (the whole thing) is like a black
shadow box; and on it is this lone object shaped like a cylinder, sort
of like a cheese box, only small, about five or six inches in diameter, and it's
red lacquer, and it's spinning like a top - only it's not really - it's rotating
around ... and now I remember that the semicircle of the balcony did the same
thing, and also the inverted semicircle of the statues in the other thing.

Third dream:

Oh, I think
of summer camp. I remember ... that you have to be able to tip over a
canoe and right it again, something like that. These were obstacle tests.

Fourth dream:

I was peeling
an onion and talking to somebody ... But before that, I was dreaming about my
mother as a little girl standing in the doorway of a Victorian parlor,
facing a niche of some sort, and this arch doorway was all surrounded with some
kind of filigree-like curtains, or some twig design that they thought was very
artistic around 1903 or 1904 or so. [Rousseau painted Football Players
in 1908.]

Fifth dream: No obvious
references.

Sixth dream:

Myself and
two other kids ... Anyway, we were swimming in a swimming pool ... The scene
shifts and it has something to do with the headmaster of a prep school,
so I suppose that the swimming pool was at the prep school.

Excerpts from subject's
associations:

There was an awful
lot of movement ... I think it was kind of a counterclockwise
motion-circular, revolving motion ... There was even a merry-go-round in it
somewhere.

The points of formal
correspondence rest on the repeated reference to semicircular quality, the
arrangement of statues in a semicircle and a form that is spinning like a top
(cf. the football). Other interesting areas of correspondence involve the
reference to a camp or prep school and the Victorian setting.

D. Correspondence based on both form (square framework) and content (Madison
Square Garden, boxing)

Example 7

The target selected and shown in
Figure 14 was Dempsey and Firpo by Bellows. This target portrays
two boxers and a referee in a rectangular boxing ring. One of the boxers has
been knocked through the ropes into the audience.

... something
about posts ... Just posts standing up from the ground, and nothing else ...
There's some kind of a feeling of moving ... Ah, something about Madison Square
Garden and a boxing fight. An angular shape, as if all these things that I see
were in a rectangular framework. There's an angular shape coming down toward
the right, the lower right, as if you were seeing a filming that took up a
whole block ... That angular right hand corner of the picture is connected with
Madison Square boxing fight ... I had to go to Madison Square Garden
to pick up tickets to a boxing fight, and there were a lot of tough punks - people
connected with the fight - ­around the place and I had a hard time finding the
people who were supposed to have the tickets for me, and a guard was in front
of the gate to the office where these people were and I had to talk with this
guard. I could have had an argument with him, but instead we got along and
talked about it, and finally he let me through the gate into the inner office
and I finally got the tickets.

Excerpts from subject's second
dream report:

The machine
is a strange shape. It's got two squares and stands about as high as a man and
it's got two squares, as if cube forms connected by a vertical shaft ... I
can't associate that shape with anything I know. It's strange, too, I'm unclear
if there are two or three figures in the dream because there seems to be the
presence of other people ... These people seem to have met in a social
situation but they were there for some other purpose anyway, and they came
together, but when they came together it was apparently the only reason that
they came together. Now it seems to be clearer. There's another figure. It
seems more clear that there's one older figure of an old man and two younger
ones that I can remember, and there certainly is an awareness of a third
person.

Excerpts from subject's third
dream report:

A hexagonal
cube appeared. It's a cube with a number of sides. I don't know exactly how
many, but something like six or eight ...

Well, the
thing that came to my mind was as if this picture took place in a square
frame ... I went to Madison Square Garden with some money to pick up
tickets which had been ordered by someone in the office, and again there was
this huge building-this was just the association to Madison Square Building
or Garden - there was this huge building and there were all these
wrestling and boxing posters around, and a bunch of kookie-looking
people - most of them sort of looked like they could have been wrestlers, or old
fighters or something - in line wanting to get tickets to these events, and
I went upstairs and went to this thing called the Boxing Club or
something where you get tickets ... I think if you hadn't brought it up, I
think I might have forgotten about that Madison Square Garden.

This was an interesting
synchronicity involving a past event (having gone to Madison Square Garden) and
the choice of target for that night.

E. Correspondence based on emotional impact

The randomly selected target,
"Animals" by Tamayo, is shown in Figure 15. The
painting depicts two dogs with flashing teeth eating pieces of meat. A huge
black rock can be seen in the background. The points of correspondence between
dream and target picture are noted in the following excerpts.

Excerpts from S's second dream
report:

... the name
of the dream was "Black Wood, Vermont" or something like that ...
Well, there's this group of people, and they have an idea that they're picked
out for something special ... and that these other people were threatening
enemies ...

Excerpts from S's third dream
report:

I was at this
banquet ... and I was eating something like rib steak. And this friend
of mine was there ... and people were talking about how she wasn't very good to
invite for dinner because she was very conscious of other people getting
more to eat than she got-like, especially, meat-because in Israel they don't
have so much meat... That was the most important part of the dream, that
dinner ... It was probably Freudian like all my other dreams - you know,
eating, and all that stuff, and a banquet ... Well, there was another
friend of mine, also in this dream. Somebody that I teach with, and she was
eyeing everybody to make sure that everybody wasn't getting more than she was,
too. And I was chewing a piece of ... rib steak. And I was sitting at
the table eating meat, and people were telling me that this Israeli friend of
mine was not nice to invite to a banquet because she was always afraid she
wasn't getting enough ... I was invited because I'm polite and not demanding,
but I just tried to keep my mouth shut in the dream. I tried not to say
anything about her, even though in a way I was glad that she was finally being
found out ... And the second one ... was about Vermont, Black Rock, Vermont ...
Yesterday, I was at the beach, and I was sitting on one of the rocks ... and I
felt like that mermaid from Black Rock ...

The content of dreams

Elsewhere (Ullman, 1973, 1986;
Tolaas, 1986) it has been suggested that the screening of content for
appropriateness for inclusion in the dreaming experience can be understood on
the basis of a vigilance hypothesis. This view suggests that dream consciousness
is an elaborate form of orienting activity designed to attend to, process and
respond to certain aspects of residual experience, with an endpoint being
reached in either the continuation of the sleeping state or its interruption
and consequent transformation to awakening.

The affective residue which
makes its presence felt in the dream operates reflexively or automatically as a
scanning mechanism. Ranging over the entire longitudinal history of the person,
it exerts a polarizing influence, drawing to itself and mobilizing aspects of
past experiences that are related to it in emotionally meaningful ways. In a
different context, Dewan (1969) has called this "emotional tagging"
and has identified it as a device facilitating memory storage and consolidation.
Here it is viewed as an energizing or mobilizing effect necessary to help the
sleeping organism to fully assess the meaning and implications of the novel or
disturbing stimulus and through the participation of a monitoring process
either allow the sleep cycle to remain intact or to result in arousal.

The concept of vigilance in
relation to dreaming suggests a survival function. The intrinsic emotional
honesty of dream imagery is the means that serves this purpose. Just as other
animals survive in the wild by being in accurate touch with their physical
environment, we humans have to be in truthful touch with our human environment.
We are a single species and our ultimate survival as a species is dependent on
maintaining a level of genuine interconnectedness that can overcome the forces
that lead to fragmentation. Dreams call to our attention anything in our waking
life that either strengthens or undermines our ties to others or to unresolved
residues from our past that shape our lives. Dreams have an advantage over
waking life, in that whatever our unconscious has to say to us it can say it
without pandering to our waking ego.

In connection with the issue of
connectivity that I have found the writing of the late David Bohm (1987) on
wholeness to be relevant, particularly his concept of the implicate order which
consists of a seamless ground of interconnectedness that in turn gives rise to
the discreteness of the manifest or explicate order. He likens the seeming
discreteness of macroscopic entities to standing waves forming out of a fluid
medium. From subatomic particles on up there is an intimate and durable
relation to the implicate order that sustains them.

The dream's focus on
interconnectedness suggests that the imagistic mode of the dream is closer to
the implicate order than the discursive mode of waking consciousness (Ullman,
1987). The initial transformation takes place when what is unconscious
(implicit) assumes the form of the sensorially apprehended images (explicit)
that appear in the dream.

While dreaming, experience is
organized along lines of emotional contiguity rather than temporal and spatial
contiguity. The affective scanning that takes place while dreaming can, on
occasion, bridge a spatial gap and provide us with information independent of
any known communication channel. Emotional contiguity, under conditions we know
very little about, appears capable of integrating transpersonal as well as
personal content into the dream. Anecdotal accounts have for a long time
pointed in this direction and the circumstances under which they occur strongly
suggest that in matters of life and death the vigilant scanning of one's
emotional environment reaches out across spatial boundaries in a manner that
has yet to be explained.

Correspondences

In the experimental work the
correspondences noted could be classified as follows:

Psychiatric implications

When the individual by virtue of
limiting psychological or emotional factors fails to maintain a sense of
effective participation in the here-and-now, psi effects occasionally occur. In
my experience patients who were more fragile and vulnerable in regard to their
hold on reality had more often and more striking paranormal experiences. In
1949 1 wrote:

... Very ill
individuals teetering on the brink but not yet over on the psychotic side often
indicate remarkable psi ability in the course of analysis. ... once psychosis,
or the complete loss of effective relationships with other people sets in, the
indications at present are that at least in the experimental situation psi
functioning is not remarkable, nor is it in the clinical situation in my own
experience ... [T]he consistent clinical fact [is] that psychotics in their
fantasies make elaborate pretensions at psi ability, sometimes quite openly,
sometimes in a more disguised form. [Ullman, 1949]

In the light of this formulation
paranormal ability comes into being as a last desperate level of relatedness
when personality factors interfere with more effective contact. Once the
individual has withdrawn from the struggle to maintain his sense of
relatedness, fantasy takes over and there are delusions of telepathy rather
than any genuine demonstrable paranormal ability. At a practical level there
are clear cut technical and instrumental gains when there is explicit
recognition of the telepathy hypothesis and its possible application in the
therapeutic situation. Anyone sensitive to the occurrence of such effects would
be in a position to recognize and handle counter-transferential difficulties
more promptly and more honestly. The work of Jourard (1971) shows that
self-disclosure is a powerful factor in accounting for the level of disclosure
offered by others. Psi events make it possible to engage in a deeper level of
mutual disclosure when such disclosure is relevant to the therapeutic
situation. Eisenbud's accounts are of particular interest in this connection
with the freedom he felt in disclosing his own interest in telepathy and the
way that interest influenced the transferential dynamics not only with a
patient (telepathy a deux) but at times with a third patient as well (telepathy
a trois) (Eisenbud, 1970).

After a somewhat dormant period
with regard to psychoanalytic interest in dream telepathy, a recent paper by
Bass (2001) took note of the various ways collusion occurred between the
unconscious of the patient and the unconscious of the analyst, amounting at
times to presumptuously telepathic exchanges. He calls attention to the possible
relevance of this to two basic concepts of quantum mechanics. The first is that
observations made at a quantum level are, in some still mysterious way,
dependent upon the arrange­ments made for the observation. One cannot
objectively separate what is observed from the observer. The second draws upon
the possible relation of telepathic transfer to the now established fact of
nonlocality. When two similar atomic particles are once "en­tangled"
and then separated, they undergo simultaneous and corresponding changes when a
feature of one particle, e.g. spin, is altered. No known force can generate
that instantaneously.7

There is one, perhaps somewhat
tangential but nevertheless relevant, aspect to the work on telepathy. Those of
us who have taken a public position espousing the reality of psi events are
aware of a lost battalion of people who have had telepathic dreams that seemed
both genuine and relevant to current issues in their lives and which left them
confused and concerned often to the point where they questioned their own
sanity. To share it with others would risk rebuff. People don't ordinarily go
around having experiences like this. I have known of situations where the
distress was severe enough for the individual to seek psychiatric help and were
faced with the psychiatrists' failure to discern or consider the difference
between a genuine telepathic experience and the claim of telepathic powers as a
symptom of schizophrenia (so noted in the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia
in the American Psychiatric Association, DSM III). Instead of a
fair-minded openness to the

reality of telepathy, they are
met with a bias that confirms their fear of self-disclosure. Caught in this
bind, such individuals ultimately gravitate toward fringe groups in search of
the support they need. One hopes that greater knowledge and a deeper
understanding on the part of the therapist of the nature and reality of psi
will someday save these individuals from the pain and distress of a frustrated search
for help and at the same time broaden the horizon of the helping profession
itself.

Notes

1. Psi is a term used to denote the main areas of parapsychological
research, namely, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis.

2. For a detailed account of these events, see Ullman (1993, 1994a,b,
1995).

3. Jung used this term to refer to acausal meaningful coincidences
linking external events to personal meaning.

4. Jung had an early and lifelong interest in the paranormal.

5. For a complete account of these studies, see Ullman et al. (1989).

6. Examples 1, 2 and 3 are from the pilot studies referred to earlier.

7. For a discussion of the possible relevance of quantum concepts such
as complementarity, the uncertainty principle, the relation of the observer and
observed and non-locality to dreaming consciousness and telepathy, see Ullman
(1999).

Evans, C. R. (1967b). Further studies of pattern perception and a stabilised
retinal image: The use of prolonged after-images to achieve perfect
stabilisation. British Journal of Psychology, 58: 315-327.